


Yennefer and Tissaia: growth and reconciliation

by young neem leaves (3ImpossiblyEclecticDuck6)



Series: The Witcher — Meta [2]
Category: The Witcher (TV)
Genre: Episode: s01e02 Four Marks, Episode: s01e07 Before a Fall, Episode: s01e08 Much More, F/F, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-18
Updated: 2020-05-18
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:33:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24248095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/3ImpossiblyEclecticDuck6/pseuds/young%20neem%20leaves
Summary: Exploring moments between Tissaia and Yennefer, and how they shape the characters of these women and their complex relationship.
Relationships: Tissaia de Vries & Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Tissaia de Vries/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Series: The Witcher — Meta [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1750285
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	1. "Forget the bottle — let your chaos explode!"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Notes on Yennefer's character development, re: the climactic scene of the Battle of Sodden

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First published on January 6, 2020

Something that hit me just last night is that, when Yennefer broke down in front of Tissaia during the climax of the battle of Sodden, saying she can’t save the continent - it’s not just a throwaway moment of despair, but the culmination of _decades_ of low self-esteem and desperate attempts to hide it on her part. 

Yen needed telling twice that Tissaia explicitly asked for her to return even after years of no contact, and Yen having turned into essentially a rogue mage and thrown Tissaia’s love for her in her face. She needed to be told that Tissaia considered her her favourite and most successful student. Yen needed to be told those things, because she had failed to protect the baby princess of Aedirn, and resorted to satisfying herself with satisfying the stifled needs of a backward town and quack cures for infertility. Yen had never actually moved beyond the initial failures of her lessons at Aretuza: she kept thinking in some part that she was weaker than others, her powers weren’t really hers, her successes were an illusion (her toxic relationship with Istredd probably had a part to play in this notion). Which is why she gets ever more desperate to claim her power in any way possible, and believing she has to buy power with physical pain, because her body is all she is. Her unhappy, wounded, _wrong_ body is what she has been reduced to time and time again by a sexist and ableist society, and try as she might to transcend her body, she can’t, not simply because our bodies are an integral part of our self, but because she has internalised some of those prejudices.

And thus, failure, cynicism, and a hazy notion of self, had turned her inside out for YEARS. She was blamed for things she had little control over (Nilfgaard’s descent into fanaticism), even as her control over her own body and future were systematically stripped from her. That’s why she kept thinking in some corner of her mind that she’d been brought to Aretuza on sufferance; she neither deserves the misery she’s suffered all her life, nor the power she managed to buy dearly. It’s a literal maelstrom of imposter complex, trauma, and loneliness that she tries to hide with her biting wit and aggressive sensuality. But one reason why her need to be loved became so self-destructive for her is because she had so little faith in herself; at the start of the battle of Sodden, she’s at her lowest, having turned pessimistic and mean, with no purpose to her life. It’s not until Tissaia actually addresses her existential crisis that she starts finding her way back - starting with how she did agree to Tissaia’s request for support and didn’t really grudge her position at the watchtower.

Yennefer’s relationship with Tissaia, the first meaningful positive relationship in her life and one of her most crucial experiences, a bond she had scorned in her bitterness over how Aretuza and the continent had failed her systemically, is what sets her on the path of healing. But importantly, the first move towards them repairing their relationship doesn’t come from Yen; it’s Tissaia’s initiative, and rightly so. Yen was never at fault, and Tissaia knew it, even she was endlessly frustrated by her protegee’s attempts to one-up the system. Yen was responsible for her own life, and what happened to her wasn’t Tissaia’s fault; but Tissaia still has a lot of responsibility towards the disabled girl she forcibly brought to her school. Tissaia may have contented herself with the limited privileges and prestige that her position as a powerful sorceress afforded her; but logically, it’s wrong to expect the same of another woman. (The issue becomes even more complex when you consider that Tissaia and Yennefer are white and brown, respectively - although the racial dynamics are more part of the subtext.) The first thing Tissaia does on coming back to her senses after the battle of Sodden is search for Yennefer, because she knows now that she can’t keep on just blaming Yen for her own misery. She knows her own place in Yen’s life; moreover, everything she’s blamed Yen for and had prided herself on not doing, are suddenly looking hollow. Misdirections on the path of the truth that is the rot festering in the society, manifested in Stregobor and Fringilla.


	2. More Notes on the Battle of Sodden scene

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First published on January 6, 2020

Another thing about the climax of the battle of Sodden: I love how, with her heavy dress made of ropes, and her belly wound, Yennefer looks doubled up and curled into herself with the pain, just like the kyphosis she was born with and had to “cure” without realising its consequences. In any other narrative with ableist symbolism, this would probably have signalled a regression; but here, it’s Yen physically reaching into her old, deep wounds, the ones that the magical correction of her body only worsened, to harness an innate strength that all the magic of Aretuza could never discipline. And when she rises to unleash her power, she stands upright of her own will again, truly self-possessed for the first time in her life. Only in the unleashing of her mad power does Yen learn how to control it.


	3. Subtextual Racial Dynamics

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First published on January 6, 2020

The relationship between Tissaia and Yennefer is legit the best, but it gets even more interesting in the light of the racial dynamics. Yennefer, a brown woman, being bitterly let down by the institutions Tissaia, a white woman, tried to bring her into and make her respect as much as she does herself. Yen wanting to burn down the status quo right down from its systemic level, and Tissaia getting increasingly upset as she doesn’t understand why Yen simply can’t _conform_ to the system she herself believes in firmly. Tissaia sympathising with Yennefer as a woman, who had to sacrifice parts of her physical and emotional being to gain power in a male-dominated world, who has to keep retreating from the principles she tried to teach her brown protegee. Tissaia’s waiting for the right moment, the right cause and circumstances, nearly destroyed her and Yennefer, and it’s not until she’s nearly dead herself, and Yennefer rains fire around her, that she understands the depth of her student’s pain. And in the process, the two women find something new in their relationship. Where Yennefer had constantly rebelled against Tissaia’s imperious self-control and authority over her and Aretuza, and Tissaia had struggled to contain Yennefer in spite of knowing that it’s a doomed effort; by the end, they’ve reached a certain point of equality as women who have fought battles together. By now, they are almost friends.


	4. Re: Tissaia's Abusive Behaviour

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First published on January 20, 2020. This is for a reply to my first post, on the Battle of Sodden scene.
> 
> I have no memory of having written this post. I was going through a family crisis at the time.

@jilyandbambi reblogged [your post](https://youngneemleaves.tumblr.com/post/190102341607) and added:

> also, like, their relationship starts off with Tissaia flat out _buying_ Yennefer and abducting her to Aretuza.
> 
> #[still waiting to see if that’s ever addressed](https://jilyandbambi.tumblr.com/tagged/still-waiting-to-see-if-that%27s-ever-addressed) #[also: how abt how Yen is the only brown member of her family](https://jilyandbambi.tumblr.com/tagged/also%3A-how-abt-how-Yen-is-the-only-brown-member-of-her-family)

The thing about Yen being the only brown member of her family, I’d interpreted as her being this lost girl who was possibly adopted by a white family (textually, people who aren’t of the same half-elven blood as her), whose initial pity for her may have eroded and gave way to resentment and cruelty.

But yeah, about Tissaia and Yennefer: you could, if you wanted, argue that it was Tissaia’s way of rewarding Yen’s foster father for keeping the girl with him all these years just until Tissaia could sense her presence and come to take her away. There’s also a contempt and meanness in the way she bargained with him; she insisted on lowering the price, using a “customer privilege” of sorts against him. The price wasn’t the factor, because Tissaia probably knew that the man would throw away his disabled foster-daughter. Perhaps she knew that he would try to get his money’s worth anyway. Tissaia wanted to demean him in particular. What she wasn’t thinking of was that this event would devastate Yennefer.

Even so, Tissaia kept on unnecessarily calling Yennefer ‘piglet’ in Aretuza. She is right when she says that suicide would have been Yen losing control over her own life, not gaining it; but there’s very little, almost no compassion in her when she says that. I bet she had been one of those people who think people who commit suicide are fundamentally weak or cowardly. Her school was a cold place, with the girls trained to use magic against each other from an early stage, starved for kinship and affection (which is why the scenes in _Before A Fall_ were so significant). [Paste Magazine: “The talented female mages of Aretuza run the gamut from sweetly noble to selfishly manipulative, but their leader Tissaia de Vries’s rule is based on a combination of snarky cruelty, frosty care, and a constant willingness to sacrifice any one of her “girls” for what she sees as the greater good.”](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pastemagazine.com%2Farticles%2F2020%2F01%2Fthe-witcher-women-yennefer-ciri-netflix.html&t=NDYzYmY3YzhkZTE2NTc4OGIzM2U1M2U2YmQyN2NlYTViMWMwOWFjZix6akt3OG9VQQ%3D%3D&b=t%3AiHb9iUvjfkOlWBR5HBfSbg&p=https%3A%2F%2Fyoungneemleaves.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F190361800277%2Fjilyandbambi-youngneemleaves-the&m=1) Her line - _“Sometimes a flower is just a flower, and the best thing it can do for us is die”_ \- is a chilling note of how she grades the world around her. There’s another line written about her that I love, from [Vulture: “After she attempts suicide as a teenager, De Vries saves Yen’s life, only to then degrade her and build her up as she sees fit at the magical academy Aretuza.”](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vulture.com%2F2020%2F01%2Fthe-witcher-netflix-feminist-fantasy.html&t=MDNlMGQ1ZTIyMTg5ODM3NGQwZTJmMDdlMjcwODI1MDVmNjYxMzZmNSx6akt3OG9VQQ%3D%3D&b=t%3AiHb9iUvjfkOlWBR5HBfSbg&p=https%3A%2F%2Fyoungneemleaves.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F190361800277%2Fjilyandbambi-youngneemleaves-the&m=1) Yennefer began to impress Tissaia only when Yen insisted on her passions, her chaotic, undisciplined magic. Here was a girl that Tissaia could not simply punish into obeying her. Yennefer became _a strong girl despite her disadvantages_. 

The problem lies with the system, of course, because it’s designed to operate against women, the poor and the disabled people. It was never going to be a fair fight, and Yennefer is right to insist that Aretuza, and the Brotherhood, fails everyone, and they had failed her particularly badly. But the problem with Tissaia is that she’d taken the fact about it not being a fair fight at face value. She knows the system is deeply corrupt, but she became one of the typical models of white feminism to be seen around, the women who believe that weaponised femininity is everything. The system has to be fine, because _she_ had been able to make her way into and to the top of it; anyone who fails probably just isn’t made of the right stuff. She’d bought wholesale into the fiction that women _have to_ give up something to gain something else. It took her a long, long time to realise that her problems with Yennefer are less a result of Yen’s irresponsibility and more due to Tissaia’s own internalised ableism and misogyny. Tissaia couldn’t realise the gravity of her mistakes until she realised that people like Fringilla and Stregobor were threatening not just the security of the continent, but also Tissaia’s individual authority, and, eventually, Aretuza’s autonomy.


	5. Reclaiming Cintra and Yennefer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On the scene in "Before a Fall" where Tissaia argues for the Brotherhood to support Cintra in the battle against Nilfgaard.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First published on March 08, 2020, in reply to this post: https://krimzie.tumblr.com/post/611901290687184896.
> 
> The subtext in this show, I swear...

[Original dialogue for context:]

> **Tissaia:** Cintra has chosen to turn it's back on us. They are proud and smart and difficult, yes. But I'd wager above all else, they're scared. We've called them a lost cause for years. But we stopped trying, too. And it is time now that we risk not only our lives, but our pride, and try again!

Oh yeah, and Tissaia is still convinced that she’s in the right and Yennefer is in the wrong. That now they just have to forget their _differences_ to fight for what really matters. The point of her argument is still to save, reform, and reclaim Cintra _and_ Yennefer. In which you also see that Yennefer is being equated to a difficult political entity, a kingdom, a piece of land subject to domination. Above everything else, Tissaia, the moderate, wants things to go back to what she imagines they were, which is to say, the ideal state of things.

I don’t think Tissaia understood Yennefer’s actual flaws at that point, or what really made her do what she did. And she doesn’t really get the depth of Yen’s pain until Fringilla sprays her with demeritium (she even tried to reform Fringilla and bring her back into the fold). Tissaia is so convinced by the power and importance of Aretuza and the current social institutions that she doesn’t see why they are all crumbling. She doesn’t see that the world is falling because the foundations are all corrupt. Basically, Tissaia is a conservative-leaning moderate and Yennefer is, at this point, the kind of radical anarchist who insists that because the system is rigged, voting and other kinds of political activity are utterly pointless.

Yen learns to climb back out of her cynicism, and Tissaia learns that there’s something deeply wrong about the way her ‘girls’ have been treated throughout _._ But that’s not by the two of them seeing each other clearly _._ Tissaia keeps seeing Yennefer as her protegee, the student she got the most emotionally attached to, the demanding girl unhappy because she didn’t get what she want, who is still her responsibility (and rightly so, to an extent), instead of the fact that Yennefer is a full-fledged sorceress now and has come to her beliefs after a long period of observation and very bitter experience. Yennefer is still ambivalent about Tissaia’s role in her life: she’s both grateful to her for ‘saving’ her and angry for sentencing her to a life she hadn’t exactly wanted. It’s just that convenient thing that happens in life and stories, where two things come together at the right time and make something different and interesting, and, perhaps, even good.


End file.
